I have only been to Charlevoix once, in the summertime of 2005 when it was bursting with cheesy Midwestern tourists and preppy boat people stuffing their faces with fudge and ice cream, strolling around browsing sweatshirt shops and the one decent bookstore. It’s a ghost town in December. Little restaurants litter the main street along the waterfront, and inside any single one of them I could order a glass of wine—nothing radical, just a discreet glass of Pinot Noir, an appropriate letting off of steam for a woman whose sister/mother is living on a soon-to-be-quarantined island with metastasized cancer—a nice warm red to pair with cold Michigan air. Mami, I should stipulate, has no comprehension of twelve-step programs, though of course being Baptist she does not drink. I could order a glass of wine in her presence and she would notice this even less than the trucks that nearly killed us on the highway. This is important: I want you to know that I could have ordered a glass of wine, but didn’t. I will always want someone to give me a medal for that, every single day of my life, even though it’s childish and I don’t deserve a medal for living inside my own head instead of making myself disappear. Don’t other people have to live inside their heads, too? But this is a slippery slope of rationalizations: Are the other people here, in this quaint tourist joint off-season, fighting to quell the perpetual roar of their brains? Do their heads sound like mine? Are their sisters dying? Are their sisters their mothers?
All addicts, under layers of self-loathing and shame so thick you can’t reach the skin, have hearts beating with belief in their own exceptionalism. I am the piece of shit at the center of the universe. The reward for sobriety is supposed to be an ability to face myself in a mirror. Problem is, there are a lot of ways to be ashamed in a mirror. You don’t have to be drunk or high, as you and I have both discovered, Nick. I say this now to be collusive with you, because I love when we are coconspirators, but really I have always known this. All it takes is noticing that I took the time not only to put on dark red Chanel lipstick before leaving to drive my grieving mother to my dying sister on her quarantined island, but to reapply said lipstick in the toilet of some gas station where I texted you, Kill me now. Get ammo and scale some tree and put a bullet in my brain like a sniper when I can’t see it coming, you’d be doing me a favor. And you texted me, You’re talking to the wrong guy, and I started laughing hard because you told me once that every single sentence in the universe can be answered with one of the following statements: I don’t know, and, You’re talking to the wrong guy, and I’d been trying to think of exceptions ever since but couldn’t. I texted back, Oh I’m talking to the right guy all right. You’re my idea man. And you wrote, I’m so sorry sweet girl. I’m no good with a gun but I’ve got your back.
We are weeks away from sleeping together, though we don’t know it. I may be an asshole, but I am not yet the villain of any larger story. Right now we are merely (merely?) best friends, in a kind of delighted, over-the-top way of two kids who meet on the first day of summer camp and immediately recognize one another as fellow troublemakers. You have a wife and two sons, one of whom has cerebral palsy; I have two divorces, a lover who treats sex like her personal Mount Everest, and a family history that reads like some amalgamation of Shakespeare, Freud, and a telenovela. But none of that particularly matters because the artsy white guy and the exotically ethnic lesbian are a recognizable (even cliché) friend pairing in tribes like ours, and so we make a kind of sense, and no one has thought to question us yet.
I don’t order the wine, Nick.
Mami and I have missed that day’s ferry by a good stretch, so we share a tiny motel room off the main drag, at a place called Villa Moderne. Several letters in the sign fail to light up and cannot be seen in the dark so that the sign reads “Vi la M dern.” That is good enough for us.
“No offense, but I’m not going to be able to sleep if you’re crying all night long,” I whisper to Mami in the motel office. “We should probably get two rooms.” But Mami has her Stranger Smile plastered on her face, her White Person Smile, even if the white person in question is only a townie high school boy, and she asks for one room, pays cash like a fugitive. I don’t speak up to change anything. In our room, Mami tries to call Isabel again without avail, sobs her way through some basic cable, and falls asleep before 10:00 p.m., the room now quieter in the end than my Chicago apartment, few cars even on the road. Still, I’m nocturnal. I text back and forth with you like we always do late at night, smoking on the rocking chairs in front of the motel with my mother’s down coat wrapped around my pajamas. I exhale smoke and visible breath into the sharp air, with no idea that you and I will soon be at this motel together, because how on earth would I know something like that? I don’t know yet that, if Time is an illusion, then right now you and I are already tangled on the bed of the room around the corner; that we are already on these wooden rockers sharing one of my cigarettes with the filter ripped off. We have seen each other nearly every single day for half a year or so, but other than the casually tight hugs you give everyone and the way we pass cigarettes between us savoring the imprint of one another’s mouths, we have never touched. You have a crush on me, in a way befitting a long-married man on his “safe” dyke friend; you have a crush on me, in a way befitting my constant need to be perceived and desired; we are both happy with this arrangement, this titillating, nonthreatening arrangement; these are the stories I tell myself.
But what does it matter what I believe, when it’s already clear that I am a person not to be trusted about anything? What does that matter when Mami and I don’t even have any idea how to get Isabel off the island to a hospital? Part of what is wrong with me is that I have no perspective.
Isabel’s husband meets us at the ferry. Mami is seasick from the December waves. She’s been orange for about a decade now, which Miguel and I can never figure out—she is not the type to go to tanning beds; maybe a self-tanning cream or something?—but under the orange, green around her gills now, too. Mami is some kind of rainbow, staggering down the metal staircase and pouring herself out into the parking lot, into Edwin’s arms. Edwin Martinez is not That Kind of Latino, but Mami doesn’t care; she doesn’t understand the difference and touches him all the time, gesturing with her hands in his face, raising her voice and pantomiming emotions with her eyes and mouth until Eddie looks dizzy. He keeps making small, jerky motions that I know indicate a desire to move us into his truck, parked on the other side of the metal chains cordoning off the ferry, but I don’t follow him. I stand there passive-aggressively clutching my luggage and leave the two of them to fend for themselves, speaking their amalgamation of Spanish and English and yet having no idea how to bridge a gulf of translation. It takes Eddie ten minutes in the whipping wind to get Mami across the lot and inside the truck. Normally I would be chewing my own leg off to get out of the cold but I’m numb. I should sit between them, as the youngest, but I don’t want to press up against Eddie so I let Mami crawl over, her short legs barely enabling her to get inside the truck’s cab. I lean my cheek into the frosty window and try to stop the jackhammer noise in my skull, like icing a wound, but neither Mami nor my head will quiet down.
Sloptown Road. My biological mother lives on Sloptown Road.
Her house is one of the prettiest on the island, though, outside of some of the really fancy ones on Donegal Bay. The house has a name, “Strong’s Landing,” origins unclear, but it used to be a B&B by the same name. It sits on a twenty-acre apple orchard, with wooded trails in the back. It’s the oldest still-lived-in log cabin on the island or something, too, although most of the house is a new expansion, and only the little living room with the potbellied stove and one upstairs bedroom still have the original log walls. When I came that one time three years ago in the summer, the outside of the house exploded with flowers in that deliberately haphazard way of an overgrown English garden. Isabel’s pretty, old-fashioned pink bicycle was propped against the house amidst a tangle of flowers, and I would borrow it and ride to the beach, where I could look o
ut at one of the lighthouses and see the ferries coming in. Even in high season the island had a deserted feel; every time a car passed me on the road, the driver would wave, as though stunned to have encountered another human being. In the mornings, I would ride Isabel’s pink bike to the tiny airport, down a long unpaved, gravelly road canopied by trees growing from either side and touching in the middle. The bike and the trees made me feel like I was in the South of France, in some foreign film, rather than in Upper Michigan where the best place in town to get breakfast was some weird little joint attached to an airstrip. People with private planes would fly in, eat breakfast, and fly out. It was some kind of Thing, the waitress explained; this was something rich people with planes did, not just here but other places, too. They flew places and ate at airport restaurants and got back in their planes.
It occurs to me that I am making it sound like I did all of this alone, but of course you know I don’t like doing anything alone. Miguel was with me, riding Eddie’s bike and “making peace” after more than five year’s relative estrangement with Isabel, following her crazy bullshit around his wedding. Isabel and Miguel were flawlessly polite to one another, as though cast in a BBC miniseries about English servants with stiff upper lips and perfect manners. Nothing of substance was ever discussed, and although we were all adults, mainly the trip consisted of the illusion that Miguel and I were constantly sneaking out of the house to smoke. Miguel called Eddie’s bike the Hobbit Bike, and late in the trip his back went out from taking it around everywhere on the bumpy roads. We would sit at the outdoor picnic tables of the airport restaurant and smoke our lungs raw and drink coffee and I guess eat. We would talk like Miguel and I do: like every word is a secret of great import, though really we did nothing but gripe about our repressed, religious family and trade stories about our sex lives, our laughs always dry and under our breaths.
In December, there is no pink bike propped against the house. I didn’t bring my car over on the ferry from Charlevoix because vehicle transport has to be arranged ahead of time and Mami and I came too much on the spur of the moment, but all at once I realize what a mistake this was: Eddie’s truck is a stick, and town is something like two miles away. Whatever flowers still exist are dead for the winter, and Isabel may not live to see them bloom again. I hate the fucking flowers anyway, the way they die and come back to life unscathed. They are like me that way, maybe. In December, with no bike and a useless truck and already frigid temperatures, I am trapped at Strong’s Landing until Mami consents to leave or Isabel consents to come with us to Chicago.
We enter through the back, just like last time I was here. Two rocking chairs sit on the porch, which looks out onto the high grass and the apple orchard. I don’t want to admit this—because the consensus in my family is that Isabel is deranged to live out here—but I understand the magic of this place. There are no mountains or other dramatic landscape, yet Isabel’s backyard is one of the most beautiful places on earth. If I were an artist, this would be an amazing place to paint; if I were a mother, I would want to picnic in this backyard with my children, on a giant white blanket. But I am none of those things.
Eddie puts Mami’s bag down inside the house and says, “Isabel is sleeping,” and bolts upstairs. Mami and I look at one another, and her eyes well up again but this time I know it isn’t the cancer. In a normal house, the mother would rush up the stairs and embrace her sick daughter; the daughter would be waiting and fall into her mother’s arms. But with Isabel, none of the normal rules of life have ever applied, and as always Mami and I are left standing here holding the bags, with each other as a consolation prize.
As I go up that tomb-like staircase with walls on either side of my body, you should know my heart is flipping in my chest like a fish. I’m afraid to look at Isabel. I don’t know what to expect. I haven’t seen Isabel in three years. Is it strange to say that the fact that she is my mother seems more acute the less I see of her? That when she briefly lived in the house with me, then just across the city, she was playing the role of my older sister, and consequently I rarely considered the alternative?
Mami doesn’t climb the stairs with me. Even in this, they are in a contest of wills. At the top of the staircase I turn left and I am in her doorway. Maybe one of the other two bedrooms is an office now. All the doors are shut. Bebe closes her office door, too, when she works, sometimes ten or twelve hours a day, coming out only for tea and granola bars. I am never allowed to enter without knocking and waiting for her voice to grant permission. In my childhood, doors were never closed unless someone was taking a shit. Once Miguel left for college, Mami and I often didn’t even close the door to pee when Carlos was at work. We kept right on talking over the stream. No one had an “office.” Mami and Carlos even slept with their bedroom door open, with an implication that they never had sex, though I now realize that who knows, they could have been fucking on the dining room table while I was out (always out) with my legs in the air in Javier’s orange Corvette. Middle-class people don’t realize that they invented the closed door.
I rap on Isabel’s distressed wooden door so hard I hear Mami downstairs mutter “Aye” in nervous shock. Isabel’s voice takes longer to say, “Yes?”
“We’re here.” I’m talking as I open the door, like people do on television, but the truth is I’m not looking at her yet.
“I told her not to come.”
When I finally see her it’s this crazy overlapping of horror and relief and old obsessive analysis. Isabel is a chameleon. In my youth—when she arrived in Chicago during my sixth year of life—she was a hot Puerto Rican chica. She wore tight jeans and low-cut shirts and that fucking hair, Jesus that hair. She looked like Frida Kahlo in a Guess jeans ad. She was short like Mami and I are, but she had more substance, more heft, real tits and ass and flesh that always seemed dewy like someone was following her around with a bottle of mist. The last time I saw her, by contrast, in 2005, she was wearing an oversized floral dress and zebra-print wellies and had a hoe in her hands. Her hair was still long and flowing over her shoulders but she didn’t lacquer or style it and the effect was weirdly more sexual than her teased look of old. The first thing I see now is that her hair is flapper short, razor blunt around her jaw, and that she has lost so much weight she has almost no breasts. Isabel has always had the darkest skin in the family but she looks strangely white in the wintery sunlight spotlighting her bed.
“What do you mean you told Mami not to come?” I say. “You wouldn’t take our calls, you didn’t tell her anything.”
“I told Eddie to tell her.”
I make some noise like a cat coughing something up. “Oh come on.”
We talk like this. My relief is harder to find the longer I look at her. On first walking in the room I was just glad she wasn’t hooked up to tubes and supine, too weak to speak or something. I don’t know what I expected but it was terrorizing to anticipate it; the reality of her seemed better than what was in my head. Now, though, she’s so small in the bed that it’s impossible to believe she has an adult daughter, Ezme, just out of college and working in Grand Rapids. Yet conversely she has lines around her eyes and mouth I have never seen before, as though in losing so much weight her skin collapsed. Where is the slutty Frida Kahlo? I don’t want this shorn ghost. Isabel has always been shockingly, inappropriately beautiful, but now she looks something like a fifty-year-old baby. Three years ago, the last time I saw her, she was forty and looked twenty-nine and like she was in some faux-farm photo spread for one of those glamorously hypocritical simplify-your-life magazines. Simplify your life by working so hard on your environment that you and it will always look perfect. I had laughed at Isabel, gardening, making her own bread and yogurt, though really it filled me with sick envy—I had mocked, You need to buy some goats to walk around behind you looking atmospheric, and she had said back, completely deadpan, I’ve ordered some chickens but you’ll be gone by the time they arrive. The woman in this bed is something it would be bad form to photog
raph. I could cry looking at her, except no one in our family spare Mami has ever been remotely capable of that.
“You need to get her out of my house,” Isabel tells me. Her refusal to say Mami is conspicuous, like we are playing a party game where you aren’t allowed to say a certain word or you lose. I want to ask her how she feels or what the game plan is but she won’t let me.
“Isabel,” I say, and I sit down on the bed, trying to indicate friendliness, trying to indicate some familiarity between us that doesn’t exist. “I can’t do anything with Mami. We have one car and it’s in Charlevoix. Don’t pretend like you think Eddie would ever actually tell Mami you didn’t want to see her—if you really didn’t want to see her then you should have called and told her not to come—you should have taken one of her eight million calls. There’s one ferry a day, so if you want us to leave, you have to at least wait until morning.”
“I didn’t say you have to leave.”
I will replay this moment for years, Nick. The way she thinks as she says this that she’s conveying approval, maybe even love for me, but what she’s really doing is revealing that I am nothing but a pawn. That she doesn’t respect me enough to think that if she draws a line in the sand I’ll choose the woman who raised me over her. Isabel acts like a victim, but I have never been in a room she occupied where she didn’t hold all the power. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t realize any of this until later but the truth is I knew it before I even entered her bedroom.
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