Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “Oh my god! That’s so amazing!” Lina is smiling, but abruptly Miguel notices that the smile is the same one she’s been wearing all night; it is her formal smile, a perfect curved U of gleaming white teeth, and not her wilder one where the gums show above her top teeth and she throws her head back so you can see the tendons of her neck and the inside of her mouth. Lina wasn’t impatient for the news, he realizes; she was impatient for the news to be out in the open so they could discuss it. She already knew. Except that Miguel has said nothing about it to her since she overheard the casual, strange discussion outside the theater on closing night . . . he assumed she’d have concluded by now that it was all some perverse joke . . . god knows he and Chad thought as much when they went home that night, until Emily called them the very next morning, gushing with plans, Nick still asleep but, she promised, “totally on board.” Anyway, that zombie-burlesque hocus-pocus is over now, so it’s not like Lina’s seeing Nick at rehearsals and performances . . .

  “Congratulations,” Bebe says.

  Chad’s theatrical Face of Happiness has gone on a beat too long in the face of Mami’s silence. Lina hugs him across Bebe’s body, putting him out of his misery, crooning, “I’m so thrilled for you guys—you’re going to be the best parents.”

  Mami and Carlos are both looking at their plates. This has to be one of those moments in which Miguel is being paranoid—is imagining some horrible slight that is too spectacular to exist in nature. He looks back and forth between his mother and his stepfather. He realizes, in a flash of horror, that the identical look of hysterical joy Chad’s face sported a moment ago is still arranged across his own features, waiting—waiting—

  “Mmm,” Mami says to Carlos, as though thinking on a weighty problem. “These burgers are delicious. I’m sorry I forgot to buy the ketchup.”

  The police showed up at Tía’s door in the middle of the night to say that Papi was dead. Even though Miguel slept no more than a dozen feet from the front door, he didn’t rouse, so he had to hear the details—Papi’s car careening into the Guaire River—from Mami the next morning. Neither he nor his mother wept, though Miguel felt pricklingly self-conscious, like Mami might expect some show of emotion he was incapable of mustering. He needn’t have worried: after her few cursory sentences of explanation, Mami never wished to speak of Papi’s death again, and treated any curiosity from Miguel as a personal affront.

  Time collapsed, then expanded in the days following Papi’s death. Miguel followed Mami around the small house pestering, “They’re sure Isabel wasn’t in the car? Where did they take Isabel, then? Are you sure she wasn’t in the car and they just won’t tell you because they don’t want you to be upset?” until his mother, who had never shouted at him in his ten years, screeched, “Listen to yourself, as if the police care about upsetting the likes of me—are you stupid or something!”

  Their father was dead, but somehow nothing changed. Mami and Tía gritted their teeth and carried on. Reclaiming the family’s shitty little house after Papi’s death was never even presented as an option: after only two weeks, Tía’s was simply where they lived now.

  And then, there was Isabel. Could it have been, as Miguel remembers it, as much as a month later? Surely not. Only suddenly, as though she had been delivered by gypsies in the night—as though all important news arrived in the dead of night while he slept—there was Isabel one morning, the house thick with implicit knowledge that she, too, lived here now. No one seemed surprised to see her but Miguel.

  In the time warp of memory, Miguel has no recollection of ever, in the ensuing months, “finding out” about Isabel’s pregnancy. Only of his self-contained older sister abruptly being swollen beyond comfort, bedridden on sweaty sheets, and of her shrieks, which he could hear from outdoors where they’d chased him, when she delivered. His warrior sister, who never wept or pleaded when Papi beat them, sounded like an animal skewered by spears. Afterward, there was a baby: a scrawny, black-eyed baby who cried as though she thought she lived in a mansion where people could escape her. Miguel had little interest in her—then, or during the ensuing eight years they lived together, before he departed for college.

  How long, though, did they live with Tía? It couldn’t have been more than a year, could it? Long enough for a pregnancy to come to term; long enough that Isabel was supposed to be in her first year of high school, though she never so much as reported for her first day. Miguel left the house in the morning to the baby’s screams and came home to them after school, taking to the streets to avoid both the howling infant and the silent anger of his mother and older sister, which seemed to him a form of ominous telepathic communication between them. He had no friends on this new street, so he mostly walked around alone, taunted by the other children for having a sister who was a whore, who had borne a nasty bastard, for his dead drunken father and the fact that he and his mother were “charity” Tía had taken in like stray cats. Or maybe he was taunted that way only once, and it seems, now, to have happened over and over again, Miguel riding a carousel of torment in memory. Maybe mainly, he was invisible, learning to tuck himself into corners and shadows, wondering at the life that had accidentally become his and wondering if he really existed.

  And then, he and Mami were on a plane to Chicago, with Isabel’s baby.

  Then, he and Mami were in a frozen, gray city, throwing themselves on the mercy of an abuela Miguel scarcely remembered: Mami’s stern mother, who’d always known that Mami should not marry Papi or move to Venezuela or do any of the things she’d done. Isabel was not with them on the plane—not with them in Chicago—remained behind with Tía, who had not even seemed to like her much. From what little Miguel could garner, Isabel was cooking and cleaning for the old woman instead of going to school—but why, if the baby was in Chicago, was Isabel not in school? Why was Isabel not on that plane?

  The story wafted through Miguel’s fingers like smoke. How much of it was even real? How much was illusory—some recurring nightmare made fact? These were the facts: Baby Angelina, Miguel, and Mami—who was now Angelina’s “Mami,” too—lived in Chicago, Illinois; Miguel, and later Angelina, attended a Chicago public school and were United States citizens; still, Isabel was nowhere to be seen.

  After leaving Mami and Carlos: drinking at the Violet Hour cocktail lounge. Old-fashioned cocktails in fancy glasses litter the table (Lina’s soda water and lime could be mistaken for a G&T), along with Bebe’s vintage cigarette holder, containing a cigarette, unlit, since smoking has been illegal in bars in Chicago for two years. Miguel recalls something about Bebe once making a New Year’s resolution that she would “never touch a cigarette with these hands again,” but that since she could not survive even the first twenty-four hours of withdrawal, she promptly began using a cigarette holder she’d once bought to complement a flapper costume for a Halloween party. Now, Miguel’s sister is not just a sub in the bedroom but also puts the cigarettes inside Bebe’s holder for her, at which point Bebe is free to smoke without her hands touching a cigarette. Despite the preposterous hypocrisy of this, Bebe happens to look hot with a vintage cigarette holder, especially given the Violet Hour’s speakeasy theme and the juxtaposition of this femme affectation against the butch of her distressed brown leather pants and Chuck Taylors . . . and despite also looking, on another level, of course ridiculous.

  Miguel feels acutely aware that something is different than it usually is when he goes out with his sister and her girlfriend—that he feels less uncomfortable than normal, and for an instant he thinks that this must be what fatherhood is all about: a sudden comfort in your own skin and in the world. Then he realizes what it actually is: this is the first time he’s ever been out with Lina and Bebe wherein his little sister’s petite, curvy body is not all but draped over her lover’s, and instead Lina and Bebe are sitting upright in the booth like normal people rather than nearly humping dogs. The realization, while it should come as a relief, disheartens him. Although normally he finds their excessive sexuality s
howy and a bit immature, as though they have to make a political statement of their coupledom every waking moment lest any passing stranger commit the egregious error of mistaking them for “just friends,” the fact that they are sitting like two self-contained entities, not even touching, makes him . . . sad. Is it the seven-year itch, arriving slightly early? Did they have a fight on the way to Mami’s and Carlos’s, in the car? Is boredom and distance the inevitable condition of coupledom and his sister has finally caught humanity’s universal disease? He liked it better when they were making out and talking about the differences between rattan and rawhide canes and bringing him and Chad a “violet wand” as a gift—a positively horrifying contraption that looked to Miguel like something the welder chick from Flashdance should be using at work, and not anything he wanted near his naked body. Still.

  Chad is saying, “I’m not sure you two understand—I mean, that went really really well with Wanda and Carlos tonight. When we told my parents last night, we were stupid enough to bring the sonogram with us, and when we showed it to them, they thought it was an ultrasound of another bulldog puppy—”

  “Which,” Miguel hears himself interrupt, “your parents instantly started screaming about and jumping up and down, so that was surreal in a whole other fucking manner—”

  Chad clarifies, “My mom was squealing, ‘Oh, look at my little grandpuppy.’”

  Miguel says, “Gretchen started laughing at her idiocy, and Elaine was all, ‘Just because you don’t like dogs, Gretchen, doesn’t mean the rest of us are as coldhearted as you are.’ I had to start shouting and waving the sonogram around being all, ‘This is not a picture of a puppy fetus . . .’ I’m basically standing on a chair with a megaphone, like, ‘That is a human fetus, folks!’ I’m like, ‘Gretchen donated her eggs to us so that’s her egg and my sperm and behold the fucking human fetus. You know, the thing you don’t think women should have the right to abort because it is so human? That thing you just mistook for a dog is our baby.’”

  Chad says, “Upon which my mother started to cry . . . which we think, for just about one moronic second, is because she’s so happy for us . . .”

  “But no,” Miguel says. “Suddenly Elaine is on Gretchen, hugging her and weeping and jumping up and down pretty much exactly like she did for the puppies, squeaking, ‘You’re going to be a mommy!’”

  Chad says, “My father is literally opening champagne.”

  “Both of them are fawning all over Gretchen,” Miguel explains, “and they’re alternating between telling her what a heroic saint she is for helping us, then saying how she’s going to have a baby, as though they’ve completely missed the part where she’s not the one who’s pregnant.”

  Chad: “Or that Miguel’s sperm has anything to do with it.”

  Miguel: “Or that we’re the ones who are going to be raising the child.”

  Chad: “But they’re pouring champagne!”

  Lina has barely moved during this entire exchange. Finally, she shifts positions, folds her legs under her like a child, leans into the table. “So in a nutshell, Gretchen’s a saint for helping you,” she says, “but you don’t really exist, so she’s heroically helping you in the abstract, because really the baby is still hers.”

  Miguel and Chad shout together, “Exactly!”

  “Well,” Bebe says, rolling her cigarette holder around between her fingers. “At least they didn’t try to put ketchup on the sonogram, which I think your mother and Carlos would have done if they could have gotten away with it.”

  Lina snorts. “And then poured some bleach on it.”

  Chad says to Miguel, “At least nobody cried at your house.”

  “At least at your house we got champagne!”

  Bebe says, “You should really tell your parents to get a water filter, Lina.”

  “Bebe, you just ate a bleached rat for dinner, I do not think the water is your biggest problem right now.” Lina sighs, slamming her seltzer like a shot. “I should tell my parents to buy a goddamn case of Jameson so that going to their house wouldn’t be so unbearable. At least for the rest of you.”

  As if on cue, everyone drinks deeply.

  “Technically,” Lina says, “neither one of them is actually my parent anyway, so really they should be Miguel’s problem.”

  “I’m the boy,” Miguel says flatly. “Boys are never stuck with the parents.”

  “No, I’m the boy, because I’m the only member of the entire family who eats pussy.”

  Bebe laughs. “I hate to break it to you both, but Isabel is the boy, because she moved away and doesn’t give a fuck what any of you think.”

  “Okay, kids, okay!” Chad claps like a kindergarten teacher calling for attention; the motion strikes Miguel as queenie and dorky at once, and annoys him, though perhaps not as much as his own annoyance annoys him. “This does not need to devolve into a debate over . . . uh . . . pussy—”

  “How would you know, Chad?” Lina says, leaning languidly into Bebe now, as though some ice has been broken. “You haven’t ever even been near one!”

  “Is that true?” Bebe demands.

  Miguel stands up, grabbing his sister by her bony arm. “I think it’s time for a smoke break.”

  By the time Isabel arrived in Chicago, Miguel’s luck had shifted.

  The gap between the Isabel years comprised more than half a decade, from the time Miguel was ten until he was sixteen. During these years, Isabel herself had morphed in his memory, too: a shape-shifter, with no transitions between. At Papi’s house, she had been a child: hairless, odorless, all sinewy androgynous muscles and no pores. Then there was Isabel pregnant, on Tía’s bed, seeming to fester inside her own body’s juices, bloated and greasy and sick. Miguel could not hold other images of her intact for long—Isabel wavered, drifted beyond his gaze until he could no longer see her: his sister, his surrogate mother, his savior, simply . . . gone.

  The Isabel who finally came to Chicago was close to twenty years old, and a different breed from any Miguel had encountered. He was a junior in high school and had long since stopped wondering at the narrative of his sister’s shadowy life in Caracas. If anything, the past they shared felt increasingly like a photo album of somebody else’s bad vacation, to which he had been repeatedly subjected. In her absence, he had become Someone Else. The once-defining features of his identity felt upended, the arc of his story entirely different in the new light of his teenage homosexuality. He had, at ten, been an immigrant. His English had been patchy; his mother astronomically poor and laboring at a factory while he cared for the still-infant Angelina and did most of the household chores. Mami worked herself raw and aged ten years in two before she met Carlos, another drunk, Christ, the women in his family. But life held surprises even in the most hopeless clichés, and Carlos, a bit younger than Mami’s thirty-five years, got sober and found God and married Mami, getting a second job to move them all out of their dank apartment with bars on its windows and into a modest ranch house on Chicago’s mostly white North Side.

  What did identity mean? Miguel, at ten, had seemed defined by his foreignness, by being below the poverty line, so much dust from Caracas still clinging to his skin. This condition had seemed permanent. Now, at sixteen, he was called “Mike” by his friends and was on the swim team and it turned out that—completely ill-suited to his reclusive, self-conscious, wildly cynical personality—he happened to be good looking, and girls flocked his way, and where girls flocked, guys soon followed. Popular white guys befriended him, and closeted Miguel found himself devirginizing cheerleaders in his spare time . . . an unpleasant job he believed he should consider himself lucky to have. His parents—for he had come, despite rarely conversing with him, to consider Carlos essentially his dad—went to church with embarrassing daily frequency, which seemed a weirdly Hispanic thing to do unless you lived in the Deep South. But in “Mike’s” new world, being Hispanic wasn’t necessarily a liability. It was Chicago, and in his high school of more than five thousand kids,
people came in a rainbow of hues. There was no viable way he could “come out” while living at home with Mami and Carlos, whose church believed faggots would rot in hell, but in just over a year, Miguel would be college bound, probably on some full-ride scholarship. The lens through which he was going to view the world was not yet set, but he was beginning to see glimmers that, through some lenses, being gay near the end of the century was No Big Fucking Deal.

  It was to this Chicago that Isabel arrived: a grown woman, with a hint of Frida Kahlo dark hair over her sensuous lips and neither the little-girl clothes nor the maternity smocks he remembered. Her hair spilled like a wavy black sea down her back; her petite body was composed of hairpin curves; her skin seemed to glow with perpetual fever. She radiated sex, even if Miguel suspected that his male friends wouldn’t understand the primal nature of her appeal, since they all fell over one another to go out with the most crowd-pleasing girls, the girls nobody could criticize. High school boys love nothing more than a blandly flawless girl, and Isabel’s beauty didn’t lie in the realm of conformity—she looked like the object of a Neruda poem, the star of an Almodóvar film. Isabel arrived, and with her a vortex of activity. Mami introduced her around the church community. Mami, Carlos, and Abuela all spoke of sending Isabel to Bible study to help her find a good man, and to improve her English so she could get a job if the man was not so good as all that. By her twenty-first birthday, she would be married to Eddie, desperate to cleave from Mami’s home, but Miguel yet didn’t know, when she arrived, that she would join him in stampeding for the door.